14 MusicWeek 18.05.12
BUSINESSANALYSISA&RRANKINGS EDITORIAL
Not exactly a new wave –but there’s something new this Q1 at least
TRADITIONALLY, THE FIRST QUARTER of any year was a time for record companies to wheel out their crop of new artists, taking advantage of a relatively quiet period after the madness of Q4. In recent times, however, this has become less of a factor,
contributing to what has turned into a pressing concern across the industry about the lack of new acts coming through and going on to sell piles of albums. So given that, while the first three months of 2012 were hardly vintage in terms of emerging talent, we should be very encouraged that two of this period’s three top-selling albums were newly-released debuts – and both by UK-signed acts. Between them Lana Del Rey and Emeli Sandé’s albums sold
more than 700,000 copies up to the end of March and there are many more sales still to come with the two releases last Sunday firmly secured in the Official Charts Company weekly Top 10. We can expect them to be among the top sellers across the rest of the year and quite possibly beyond. This Q1 return of two brand new, UK-sourced albums among
the top three sellers compares very favourably with the previous few years. In the first quarter of last year Jessie J – who is A&R’d out of both the UK and US – had the fifth top seller with Who You Are, while there were no domestic debut breakthroughs to really speak of during the opening quarter of the two years before that. You have to go back four years to 2008 when the year began in similar fashion to 2012 when, as now, two of the quarter’s top three albums were by debuting UK-signed artists – in that case Duffy with Rockferry and Adele with 19 (below).
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MAJORS MATCH XL Female stars help other labels overcome XL’s Adele factor
QUARTERLY FOCUS BY PAUL WILLIAMS
I
sland, Polydor and Virgin were all finally an A&R match for XL and Adele in Q1, but each needed a female star of their own to achieve it. Having been the dominant A&R force with UK
repertoire in 2011 – largely thanks to Adele’s album 21 – the independent took something of a backseat during the first three months of this year as some control of the market returned to the major record companies. This move back to the majors was led by Island
which, piloted by Jessie J, headed Music Week’s exclusive A&R market shares ranking record companies by sales of the quarter’s Top 100 non- catalogue albums by UK-signed or A&R’d artists. While Island had the Voice coach in its corner,
Polydor and Virgin in second and third places on the A&R market shares were driven by female solo talent of their own with debut artists Lana Del Rey and Emeli Sandé respectively behind the companies’ biggest UK-sourced albums of Q1. Although born and raised in upstate New York,
It is hard to overlook that all the domestic breakthroughs
mentioned here are female soloists who continue to be the principal source when it comes to successful new UK-signed artists, but at least the genre make-up has become a bit more balanced in the last few months with the likes of Ed Sheeran, Rizzle Kicks and One Direction. A lack of new album artists coming from the States in Q1 is
also notable, especially as it follows a year when there were very few new US stars, Bruno Mars being an obvious exception. It was left to a Belgian-Australian, Gotye, to take the plaudits as the freshest overseas name of Q1, a point further underlined this week as he was on course to achieve the year’s first million-selling single in the UK with Somebody That I Used To Know. Paul Williams, Head of Business Analysis
Do you have views on this column? Feel free to comment by emailing
paul.williams@intentmedia.co.uk
Del Rey added to Polydor’s domestic A&R score as she is both signed to the UK company and her A&R is overseen by the company’s president Ferdy Unger-Hamilton. That delivered more than 350,000 sales of her first album Born To Die in the quarter, according to Official Charts Company data, giving Polydor a 12.8% A&R albums market share with homegrown repertoire. Del Rey was not Polydor’s only debuting UK-
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Island top singles and albums company in Q1 for UK-sourced/A&R’d repertoire with run including Jessie J, Rizzle Kicks (left) and Florence + The Machine Universal claims 41.0% sales share of 100 biggest UK-sourced singles of the quarter and 38.4% of 100 top UK-sourced artist albums, shares in both cases twice the size of second- placed Sony EMI finishes ahead of Warner as top corporate for both singles and albums with UK-sourced repertoire, helped by strong sales by Emeli Sandé and Coldplay Ministry of Sound top indie for UK-sourced singles after chart-topping return from DJ Fresh, while XL leads for independents again on albums as Adele has quarter’s top seller Two of quarter’s top three artist album sellers by debuting UK-signed acts: Polydor’s Lana Del Rey and Virgin’s Emeli Sandé
signed artist during Q1, although she was by some distance its most successful with BBC Sound Of 2012 winner Michael Kiwanuka’s Home Again going on to sell 47,217 copies by the end of March, around 13% what Born To Die managed. The Fiction label also heavily contributed to Polydor’s A&R efforts, providing three of its five biggest domestic-sourced albums of the quarter with The Maccabees’ Q1-issued Given To The Wild joined by 2011 albums Fallen Empires by Snow Patrol and Build A Rocket Boys by Elbow. Ahead of Polydor, Island claimed a 14.9%
A&R market share made up of not just another 150,000 sales of Jessie J’s debut Who You Are – which was A&R’d in both the UK and US – but also included Rizzle Kicks’ Stereo Typical, Florence + The Machine’s Ceremonials, Ben Howard’s Every Kingdom and what in Sonik Kicks was Paul Weller’s fourth chart-topping solo album in the UK. Island and Polydor helped to give Universal a
38.4% sales share of the 100 top-selling UK- sourced non-catalogue albums of the quarter with Mercury and Decca also finishing among the Top 10 companies. Mercury was placed seventh with a 5.5% share after selling more than 100,000 copies of Maverick Sabre’s first album Lonely Are The Brave and enjoying more sales with the likes of Chase & Status and Noah & The Whale, while Decca’s eighth-placed 5.2% was headed by Military Wives’ debut In My Dreams. This was the quarter’s ninth-biggest artist album, selling 150,738 copies in four weeks.
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